Youngmi Choi, CIRCIT, & Sue O'Brien, RMIT
CIRCIT has been working on a project, 'Aboriginal E-commerce' with RMIT's Aboriginal Development Unit. The project aims to study how e-commerce can help the small Aboriginal art businesses in Melbourne, Gippsland and the Yarra Valley region to expand shares in the Australian mainstream market.
Aboriginal businesses, particularly in rural and remote Australia, do face difficulties in managing their businesses. These include poor business infrastructure (eg. credit card facilities, PCs, telephone lines), and customer management skills. Also, the businesses are further disadvantaged in developing wholesale channels if distant from metropolitan consumers. The underlining premise of this project is that the Aboriginal businesses can benefit from e-commerce by being able to directly contact consumers in Australia and overseas at a minimal cost. At an early stage of the project, we learnt that the social and cultural environment is as important as the learning and practice of e-commerce, when involving Aboriginal people. During IT learning sessions for the Aboriginal students, we found that Aboriginal people did not fear using technologies.
During the process of linking Aboriginal communities with industry sponsors we evaluated the sustainability of the selected businesses. This process uncovered a few factors seen as significant to the success of Aboriginal businesses: 1) We learnt that social issues intertwined with Aboriginal people in business, are closely related to the business's success; 2) An Aboriginal advisor suggested that Aboriginal people's work ethics can be somewhat determined by their families' work history. This project is supported by the Telematics Course Development Fund Trust (http://www.telematics.org.au) and Telstra Country Wide (Gippsland and Yarra Valley, http://www.telstra.com/countrywide/Sale/default.asp ).